Gov. Jan Brewer, who has granted the fewest clemency requests of any Arizona governor in the past 20 years, agreed to reduce Smithey's sentence to 48 years to life.

The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency will hold a parole hearing for Smithey, 69, on Aug. 13.

Brewer's proclamation commuting Smithey's sentence was not publicized by her office or the board and doesn't explain why she decided to grant clemency. Brewer declined a request for an interview about her decision.

With the exception of inmates who are nearing the end of a terminal illness, Brewer has granted only five of the 70 recommendations she has considered.

Smithey was convicted of the murder of 15-month-old Sandy Gerberick, one of four children she was caring for as a live-in babysitter. She was 20, and her trial record and prison files paint a picture of a tormented woman who endured a grim childhood.

Her father died when she was 4. The state of Oklahoma declared her mother, mired in poverty, unable to take proper care of her seven daughters. Smithey and her siblings became wards of the state. The girls were separated, and Smithey would never see most of them again.

For four years, Smithey moved from orphanages to foster homes and back.

At 8, she was adopted, but three years later, she was returned to an Oklahoma orphanage after being physically abused. She was then sent to Girl's Town in dust-blown Tecumseh, Okla.

She survived polio and rickets, a disease typically caused by malnutrition. She struggled with a speech disorder, and her eyesight was so poor, she was legally blind without her glasses.

A year after arriving in Tecumseh, she was sent to live with an older sister, Patricia Holder, in Phoenix. By then, like many children who'd fallen through the cracks in the system, she had trouble adjusting. Her sister and family found it hard to adjust to her.

According to her own testimony and other documentation in her clemency file, Smithey had been beaten and whipped by her adoptive mother. She had been beaten by foster parents and in several institutions. She had been sexually assaulted. According to a psychologist's assessment, she coped with the physical and emotional abuse by developing a tough, disrespectful, rebellious attitude -- and by running away.

She ran away from her sister's home. Sent to the home of another sister, Vickie Wilson, who lived in Chandler, Smithey ran away again and again -- twice hitchhiking to Dallas, where she had two aunts. Both times, police picked her up. The second time, she tried to commit suicide, according to police records.

"I wasn't settled; I ran away a lot," she said in a recent phone interview at the Perryville state prison. Corrections officials would not allow The Arizona Republic to interview her in person.

The next time she ran away, her sisters made no effort to regain custody, and she wound up at the Oklahoma State Hospital for the Insane, and then, after bolting again, at a reformatory north of Albuquerque. She was not yet 16.

In the fall of 1958, she met a psychologist at the reformatory who decided she could be "reformed" and took Smithey into her home as a baby-sitter. Soon after being told that her mother had died of tuberculosis, Smithey ran away again, this time taking the psychologist's 18-month-old son.

Smithey hitchhiked with the toddler from Albuquerque to Woodward, Okla., where, posing as an abandoned wife, she talked a trucker into giving her $14 to take a bus to Dallas. A police manhunt soon caught up with her in a Dallas pharmacy. She left the boy in the store and fled but was arrested less than an hour later while buying food with the last of her money.

Convicted of kidnapping, she served four years in juvenile prisons in Utah and California before being paroled in 1962 at age 20.

Her conviction

She found work, answering an ad from a single mother in northwest Phoenix looking to hire a live-in baby-sitter. Erma Gerberick hired Smithey to help care for her four children while she worked at a restaurant. Less than a week later, on New Year's Day, 1963, while Gerberick was making breakfast, her 6-year-old son ran in and shouted "Mama, Sandy's dead!" Sandy, 15 months old, had been strangled.

Smithey was arrested the next day, while hitchhiking on the highway between Tucson and Nogales. The patrolman who found her said she told him, "I think I hurt the baby. ... I may have used a stocking," according to a news report. That night, at a Pima County jail, Smithey tried to kill herself.

Her accounts were confused. She said the baby had been crying. At her trial, the prosecutor read an interview transcript in which Smithey said she'd fallen asleep next to Sandy and found her dead when she woke up.

"When I seen the stocking in my hand ... I don't remember doing it, but I must have," she said. "Then, when I couldn't find any pulse, I kind of knew she was dead."

Her attorney tried to argue that she was mentally ill, with a defense psychiatrist describing Smithey as having only "limited and borderline" awareness of right and wrong. A state psychiatrist countered that though she was emotionally unstable, she was legally sane.

On July 10, 1963, after jurors found Smithey guilty of first-degree murder, she shouted, "I'm not going to prison! I'll kill myself! You watch!"

Nineteen days later, Superior Court Judge Henry Stevens sentenced her to life without parole, and she was transferred to the women's prison at Florence.

Getting forgiveness

Nearly five decades later, Smithey remains imprisoned at Perryville. She is, by all accounts, a different woman and not just by virtue of the fact that she'll turn 70 this fall.

Betty Smithey certainly didn't start out as a model prisoner.

In a 1974 article she wrote for a prison newspaper, reprinted by ThePhoenix Gazette, she praised then-Warden Marjorie Ward for improving conditions for inmates. Before Ward, she said:

"The emphasis was on punishment. If you gave a matron a dirty look, you could go to 'the hole.' ... I was there once for five days on nothing but bread and water twice a day -- for five days. No solid food. ... I can honestly say I've been in 'the hole' more times than any other inmate here."

And she kept running away.

In 1974, she escaped from a state prison in Missouri where she and other women prisoners had been transferred, making her way to Indianapolis before being recaptured. In June 1975, back at the Florence prison, she escaped while on a work assignment in Coolidge, again making her way to Indiana before being captured 19 days later.

She escaped again later that year in October by forcing the lock on the main door of her dormitory, cutting through a fence and scaling a 6-foot-high masonry wall topped by 4 feet of fencing and razor wire. She was recaptured four days later in a cotton field about 6 miles from the prison.

After the women's prison was moved to 32nd and Van Buren streets in Phoenix, Smithey escaped again in November 1981. She was caught after being spotted on Interstate 17 a few hours later.

Then, a few days before Christmas, in 1983, a letter arrived that changed everything for her.

"Dear Betty,

"It has been almost twenty-one years since my baby daughter died. I have thought of you often in these years. Not with hate, as you may think, but with sadness, for I forgave you many years ago. Since I have come to know the Lord I felt I should write and tell you that I forgive you. ... I'm sending you this Bible in the hope that it will bring you peace and hope. ... May the Lord bless you and give you peace and the strength to know that Jesus loves you very much and is always there when you need Him.

"Erma (Gerberick) Simmons"

Even now, 29 years later, when Smithey describes receiving that letter, it's clear that it hit her like a thunderbolt.

"I don't know if I could forgive someone for taking my baby's life," she said. softly. "I was ... I was shocked. She sent me a Bible; she even sent me a beautiful necklace, back when we could have things like that."

"For the longest time, and this ain't no lie, I couldn't look myself in the mirror," Smithey said. But after Gerberick's letter, "that's when I started to forgive myself."

"I don't make excuses for what I did," she said. She has thought endlessly about the murder but can't explain why she did it because she doesn't really understand it herself.

"I don't know what was in my mind, I really don't," she said. "I had a lot of emotional problems back then."

In their unanimous recommendation that her life sentence be commuted, the five members of the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency quoted from a 2003 psychiatric evaluation that attributes the murder to Smithey projecting her own childhood suffering onto Sandy Gerberick, so that, without being consciously aware of it, "she felt she was stopping the baby's pain by stopping it from crying."

But Smithey focuses on atonement, to the degree that's possible.

"I am very sorry for what happened. It sounds so bland and flat -- everybody says they're sorry. ... I can't bring back the life that I took. It doesn't alter the fact of what I did. The only thing I can do is try to make myself a better person."

Requests denied

Smithey stopped trying to escape from prison -- and from what she had done. Her disciplinary record began improving. She enrolled in self-improvement classes. She read the Bible. She earned her GED and went on to complete 52 hours of college credit before the Department of Corrections canceled the program. She published several poems as part of a 1993 prison-writing workshop, also now discontinued.

Smithey also gradually weaned herself from the anti-psychotic medications she had been taking since entering the prison system. By 1992, she had shown such signs of progress that the clemency board recommended to Gov. Fife Symington that he commute her sentence to make her eligible for parole. Symington denied her commutation without comment in early 1994.

In 2003, another clemency board unanimously recommended to Gov. Janet Napolitano that she commute Smithey's sentence to make her eligible for parole. The commutation letter included an evaluation by Elizabeth Kohlhepp, a Phoenix psychiatrist, who concluded that Smithey "had no signs of psychosis," that her clinical profile was normal, and that in contrast to her mental state when she was incarcerated decades earlier, "she easily formed rapport, was warm, albeit modest ... and showed a range of appropriate emotions."

"My opinion, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, is that Ms. Smithey does not presently pose a significant threat of violence to others should her sentence be commuted to parole-eligible, as long as she is provided with adequate supports," Kohlhepp added.

Smithey's older sister, DeAnna Lee Harris, wrote in a letter that she had been lucky as a child to have been adopted by a loving family and wondered how Smithey's life might have turned out if she'd had that same luck.

The board also noted that a stepdaughter of Erma Gerberick, who passed away in 2002, had responded for the family to a query about Betty by writing, "She has done enough time." Prosecutors did not oppose the clemency petition.

Napolitano denied the clemency request without comment in 2003.

Improving herself

Nine years later, Smithey tried again. On April 10, the clemency board sent a letter to Brewer recommending that her sentence be commuted to 48 years, calling hers one of those "extraordinary cases where mercy is justified."

Her team of supporters includes a niece, Rebecca Henderson, who is offering Smithey her home should she receive parole; Andy Silverman, a University of Arizona law professor who has followed her case since 1970; and Donna Hamm, a prison-reform advocate and wife of James Hamm, a convicted murderer who was granted clemency by Gov. Rose Mofford in 1991.

Smithey is what is known as an "old-code lifer," one of those sentenced between 1912 and August 1973 under laws that state they can only become eligible for parole if the governor commutes their sentence. Between 1912 and 1974, governors commuted the sentences of 294 lifers to make them parole-eligible after they'd served, on average, 11 years.

In 1973, legislators changed the laws to require that anyone sentenced to life serve at least 25 years before becoming eligible for parole. Unlike commutations, which only the governor can grant, paroles can be approved directly by the clemency board.

Since 1973, governors have steadily granted fewer and fewer commutations. Since 1989, Smithey is only the third "old-code lifer" to become eligible for parole.

The political nature of clemency decisions and a growing reluctance by governors in Arizona and nationally to grant clemency made Smithey's supporters skittish.

Henderson, her niece, declined an interview. Donna Hamm and Silverman expressed fears that any publicity could hurt Smithey's chances.

Complicating matters: The Legislature changed the law on life sentences for murder again, scrapping parole eligibility after 25 years.

"Politically, if you're a governor, it's easier not to take a chance," said P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political- science professor at Rock Valley College in Illinois who tracks the clemency and pardon process nationwide. People often have the misconception that granting clemency means letting a violent criminal out onto the street, he said, whereas almost all clemency grants are for non-violent crimes or, as in Smithey's case, when there is strong evidence that, in the decades since the crime, the person has taken significant steps to rehabilitate him or herself and merits being granted what amounts to an act of grace.

But, Ruckman said, because those misconceptions make many in the public indifferent or hostile to the idea, nowadays granting clemency amounts to an act of courage for a governor.

"Unfortunately, most of them err on the side of doing nothing," he said.

But while Arizona is seen as a comparatively punitive state, "the public is often more reasonable than the politicians who claim to represent them," said Mona Lynch, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California-Irvine. "People may say, 'Lock 'em up and throw away the key,' but they tend to be far more empathetic and reasonable when they understand the facts of a particular person's case."

"I can't undo what I did," Smithey said before the governor's decision. "But I've tried my best to rehabilitate myself.

"Over the years, I met a lot of staff members who've helped me. ... People showed me they cared. I've got my education. I never, ever let myself become institutionalized. ... I've reconnected with my family, my nieces and nephews. All I ask is a chance to prove myself."